Meats at home are usually roasted in conventional ovens for the required cooking of the proteins in meat, and to provide the best flavor development within the cooked meat. The flavors and textures that result during the roasting process provide a very palatable and desirable experience to the consumer. The roasting of meats can be controlled when performed on a small meal portion or when the cooking food is a thin slab such that the meat cooks fairly well and uniformly without overcooking some portions of the same meal.
However, when preparing large meals, such as Thanksgiving Turkey dinners and other festive holiday dinners, the large portions of meat tend not to cook uniformly in a conventional oven found in many homes. The main reason is that because of the large meat portions, by the time the coldest parts of the meat are uniformly cooked through out, the meat surfaces exposed to excessive cooking times tend to dry out and over cook in the process. These overcooked portions are usually more of a problem when the meat portions are extremely large and sometimes may even be stuffed internally with other meal portions (for example Turkey Stuffing). In order to achieve the full cook of such meals, the roasting process can be extremely long and non-uniform under conventional cooking conditions.
Some large scale commercial systems do exist to provide uniform cooking of meat portions that are very large, for example Rotisserie ovens. In these processes, the constant rotation of the meats tends to uniformly cook the meats from the surface to inside without excessive exposure of the meat pieces to the heat source. The Rotisserie units are very bulky and more suited for larger throughput rates such as in restaurants or at Food Service centers, and are not suitable for home use.
At homes, roasted meats can be rotated at scheduled intervals during the roasting process to achieve a more uniform cooking process of the meat. This manual rotation though feasible for small meals, gets to be extremely difficult for large meals. A roasting turkey bird during a Thanksgiving feast, for example, can weigh in excess of 25 pounds. These meals when manually turned over with existing kitchen utensils can be extremely difficult, dangerous (due to very hot roasting temperatures), and sometimes not achievable. Therefore, there is a need to develop a device or a process to allow for a facilitated turning over or flipping of large meat portions during a home roasting process.
Traditionally, meats when roasted in an oven are placed in a roasting pan and roasted in an oven for a time and temperature related to the size of the cooking meal and the required finished product format. Some meals are baked in an oven at a low temperature for extended periods to provide a slow roasting and gentle flavor development in the meats. Other meats are prepared by cooking the meals at high temperatures for a short time such that the meats form a well cooked exterior and a juicy semi-cooked interior.
Sometimes, these meals are coated or rubbed with oils, spices, or herbs to provide an infused flavor and aroma within the cooked meat at the completion of the roasting process.
In traditional home roasting of meats in an oven, the meats are placed in the baking tray traditionally fitted with a baking rack. The cooking meat is placed in the rack such that as the roasting progresses, any juices, fats or liquids can drip out of the meat onto the baking tray leaving the meat partially dry such that a roasted dried skin forms to encompass the cooked meat. However, the roasted surface is sometimes partially scorched or even dried beyond the desired textures such that the overall meat attains a dried tough state. During certain holiday seasons such as Thanksgiving, and other holidays, large birds and fowl meats such as turkeys are roasted in traditional home ovens and these meats tend to get partly scorched, dried, or unevenly cooked in the oven due to the poor cooking processes in the ovens. This uneven cooking of meats is further aggravated in a conventional home use oven because these meats are placed in the ovens and cannot be turned over or rotated during the traditional process because the cooking meats are extremely hot and break apart when maneuvered with cooking utensils available in a traditional home. The meats surfaces exposed to the heated side (i.e. the side facing upwards and away from the baking pan) undergo extensive drying and excessive heat treatment such that the meats adjacent to the heated surface get extremely tough, dried and unpalatable. The meat surfaces facing the baking tray tend to stay moist and partly undercooked during the conventional cooking process since the meats in this portion are not exposed to the roasting temperatures as much and also constantly exposed to the dripping juices and fats. At the end of the cooking process, the cooked meats therefore are not uniformly cooked, and the top half of the cooked meats and birds are partly over-dried, tough, and overcooked, whereas the meats at the bottom half are soft textured, less cooked and moist.
Therefore, there is a need to be able to provide the methods and processes to enable a more controlled roasting technique for home-roasting of meats. Other documents that discuss the processes and apparatus to roast meats fail to incorporate the ability to rotate the meats during the cooking process (U.S. Pat. No. 6,327,967, U.S. Pat. No. D639,601). U.S. Pat. No. 7,617,767 (Osternan et al) describes a device to hold and rotate turkey in ovens using a rod to hold the cooking meat supported solely onto end walls of the device. This method however relies on a skilled user to be able to carefully be able secure the rod into the uncooked bird, rotate the roasting meat without mishandling or falling off of roasting meat and any stuffing within roasting meat. Backus et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 7,395,602) describes a device to lift, move and flip foods relying on piercing hooked devices into the uncooked meat which is not suited for roasting ovens or for use at residential scale.
Other documents (Pei: U.S. Pat. No. 6,327,967 and Zemel (U.S. Pat. No. D640,501) disclose apparatus that can enable holding devices to contain roasting meats but fail to consider the ability to rotate the meat at intermittent stages—a key enabler to deliver the desired final roasted product. Some patents relate to the rotisserie processes which successfully roast fowl meats in commercial ovens, however, these processes cannot be converted or scaled down for implementation in a home-use oven.